Posts Tagged ‘overseas contingency operation’

There was a “Far Side” cartoon that makes all the more sense to me now. A dinosaur was standing at the podium in front of a large auditorium full of dinosaurs. And he was explaining, “We’re facing a serious crisis, gentlemen. The world’s climates are changing, mammals are eating our eggs, and we have brains the size of a walnut.”

The religious side of liberalism is every bit as bankrupt as the political side, and the constantly shrinking membership bears that spiritual, moral and intellectual bankruptcy out.

I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times about liberal Judaism that brought out the fact that liberal “Judaism” was as much a Dodo bird as liberal “Christianity.” During the same week I spoke to a “Catholic” I frequently chatted with who – after telling me he was a “radical liberal” who believed in abortion and socialized medicine – proceeded to tell me that he utterly rejected the virgin birth of Christ. Which is of course a central defining belief of orthodox/traditional Catholicism. And that prompted me to do some thinking about these so-called “mainline” liberal religious movements, and just how utterly meaningless they are.

I better nip one objection in the bud immediately, realizing as I do that many liberals either can’t read very well or can’t understand what they read. The following article is about the astounding decline of “Conservative” Judaism. But “conservative” here has nothing to do with politics or even with theology. “Conservative Judaism” is every bit as liberal as any liberal mainline “Christian” denomination. It embraces homosexuality; it embraces the notion that the Bible is basically a meaningless book that can be interpreted and then reinterpreted according to constantly changing societal norms. Which is to say, Conservative Judaism ultimately stands for nothing, and isn’t “conserving” anything remotely important.

That said, “Conservative rabbis” met in Las Vegas to try to deal with a crisis: they are going extinct. What came out of the meeting is all the more hilarious:

Three hundred rabbis walk into a Las Vegas martini lounge. Bartenders scramble to handle the crowd — the rabbis are thirsty. Suddenly, an Elvis impersonator takes the stage.

We are faced with two possibilities.

One, this is the beginning of a joke.

Two, they don’t make rabbis the way they used to.

The Rabbinical Assembly, the clerical arm of Conservative Judaism, would have you believe the second message, or something like it. That’s why it launched its 2011 convention with a martini reception at a Las Vegas synagogue. The gathering was billed as an attempt to “rebrand” the Conservative movement, which has seen alarming declines in membership in recent years.

“We are in deep trouble,” Rabbi Edward Feinstein of congregation Valley Beth Shalom in Encino told the convention the next day. “There isn’t a single demographic that is encouraging for the future of Conservative Judaism. Not one.”

Those words could apply equally to a number of U.S. religious denominations, especially liberal Protestant and Jewish faiths. Membership is falling; churches and synagogues are struggling financially; and surveys show robust growth among the ranks of those who declare no religious affiliation.

The situation may be especially alarming to the Conservative movement because it was, for many years, the largest denomination in American Judaism. It was the solid center, more traditional than Reform, more open to change than Orthodoxy.

A decade ago, roughly one of every three American Jews identified as Conservative. Since then, Conservative synagogue membership has declined by 14% — and by 30% in the Northeast, the traditional stronghold of American Judaism.

By 2010, only about one in five Jews in the U.S. identified as Conservative, according to the American Jewish Congress.

The Reform and Orthodox movements also saw declines, although not nearly as steep. Reform Judaism for a time claimed the most adherents, but today that distinction goes to people who identify themselves as “just Jewish,” meaning they don’t associate with any of the traditional denominations. Many are entirely secular.

“We’re all in trouble,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly and one of those trying to save the Conservative movement. Correcting herself, she said, “We’re not in trouble, but we’re in urgent need of rethinking the institutions of Jewish life.”

[…]

The movement’s problems, many agree, begin with its name, which has nothing to do with political conservatism and doesn’t accurately describe a denomination that accepts openly gay and lesbian rabbis and believes the Bible is open to interpretation. But that’s just for starters.

Deep dissatisfaction with the organizations that lead Conservative Judaism prompted a number of influential rabbis in 2009 to demand urgent change, warning, “Time is not on our side.” The group won promises of substantial change from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents Conservative congregations, and helped prompt reforms in the institutions that train and represent rabbis.

A similar revolt by prominent Reform rabbis preceded that denomination’s continuing effort to reinvent itself, a project launched at L.A.’s Hebrew Union College last November.

So what does it mean for a religious movement to reinvent or rebrand itself?

“It’s one thing for a corporation to say ‘We’re going to reinvent ourselves,'” said David Roozen, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“Sometimes they get into another business,” he said. “A religion … can evolve, it can be reinterpreted, you can express it in a slightly different style, but you can’t just be doing Judaism one day and say ‘I’m going to sell cars’ the next.”

The Conservative rabbis won’t become car salesmen, but they batted around some fairly radical ideas and predictably stirred up some opposition.

There was talk of eliminating membership dues for synagogues or switching to a la carte “fee-for-service” plans — so that a parent who wants only to send his or her child to religious school won’t also be paying to support the congregation’s other programs. But some said dues give congregants a vital sense of ownership.

Wolpe, the Sinai Temple rabbi, said the movement needs a slogan, one that’s short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. He suggested “A Judaism of Relationships.”

“We don’t have a coherent ideology,” he told his fellow rabbis. “If you ask everybody in this room ‘What does Conservative Judaism stand for?’ my guess is that you’d get 100 different answers…. That may be religiously a beautiful thing, but if you want a movement, that’s not such a hot result.”

[…]

And then there was the name. Some prefer Conservative, which was adopted when the movement began in the 19th century. It denotes the founders’ determination to conserve the best of Jewish tradition while being open to prudent change. But others said it is one reason the movement is seen by young people as being hopelessly uncool.

One suggestion: Change it to Masorti, a Hebrew word meaning “traditional” that is used by Conservative Jews in Israel and Europe.

“If we really want to appeal to the new generation, if you want to create a real worldwide movement … we need a common name, and I think it needs to be a Hebrew name,” said Rabbi Felipe Goodman of Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas.

As the meeting ended, there were pledges to work toward meaningful change. One example of what that might look like is an effort to employ a new definition of kosher food that would require ethical treatment of the workers who produce it —something that is being called magen tzedek, or “seal of justice.”

“This is an answer for Conservative Judaism because it’s about the marketplace, it’s about the public square,” said Rabbi Morris Allen of Mendota Heights, Minn., who is leading the effort. Magen tzedek “shifts the entire message of who we are as a religious community. Suddenly, it’s about more than just what is said at the prayer service on Saturday morning.”

Let me begin my analysis by means of a contrast. Rabbi Morris Allen says, “This is an answer for Conservative Judaism because it’s about the marketplace, it’s about the public square.” By radical, radical contrast, Christianity is about Jesus Christ, who He is—God incarnate—and what He accomplished—the redemption of sinners who embrace His atoning death for the sin of humanity.

“Conservative Judaism … [is]… about the marketplace.” That is so sad. “We need to sell more widgets, or rebrand our widgets, or maybe produce a different kind of widget.”

One of the reasons that Judaism is so swiftly disappearing is because of atheism and a virulent form of Jewish secular humanism which basically holds that it’s perfectly okay to not believe in God as long as you act as though you did.

Dinesh D’Souza points out why precisely why this phenomenon would occur – given the enormous influence of liberalism in Judaism – in his examination of why liberal “Christian” churches are losing membership in droves:

“Unfortunately the central themes of some of the liberal churches have become indistinguishable from those of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, and the homosexual rights movement. Why listen to Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong drone on when you can get the same message and much more interesting visuals at San Francisco’s gay pride parade?”

And D’Souza provides a sizable pile of statistics to show that the traditional (i.e. evangelical) denominations and churches are growing leaps and bounds even as the liberal mainline churches are going the way of the Dodo bird.

His point, of course, is that these liberal religionists are dying out because they don’t stand for anything that has any spiritual power whatsoever.

Here is the story of Christian growth in the world today:

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today, and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day – the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

Christianity – which views itself (and which I personally believe is) the fulfillment of the Jewish Scripture – is the fastest growing religion on the planet. Christianity is the world’s only universal religion; the only religion with a global reach. It is particularly spreading in the third world and in Asia. Soon, China will be the largest “Christian country” in the world. There may very well already be more Christians in China than there are in America. In Korea, Christians already outnumber Buddhists.

While mainline liberal Protestant and (mainline liberal) Catholic “Christianity” withers on the vine, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity is exploding. And while Western Europe and America increasingly deny the Christendom that brought them to greatness in the first place – even as they increasingly become less and less great as a result – Christianity is taking deep abiding root in cultures whose transformation can only be described as “miraculous.”

Meanwhile, as the statistics prove and as Dinesh D’Souza explains, atheism is shrinking in spite of all its grandiose claims to represent the fulfillment of modernity and knowledge. “Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ is now proven false,” D’Souza writes. “Nietzsche is dead. The ranks of the unbelievers are shrinking as a proportion of the world’s population… God is very much alive.” Secular humanists have long self-servingly claimed that the progression of “reason” and “science” would conquer religion, but this is now demonstrated to be a lie, a fairy tale of secularism.

Christianity stands for something. And as much as I may personally despise Islam, it too at least takes a powerful stand – even if it relies primarily on force and terrorism to make that stand. Atheism and secular humanism are only parisites hanging on to Christianity and its superior moral values, and the political liberalism that theological liberalism invariably leads to is the nihilism of objective moral truth all together.

Allow me to provide a concrete example of the empty nexus of liberal politics and liberal theology. Barack Obama, a quintessential theological and political liberal, has repeatedly stripped God out of the Declaration of Independence and its profound establishment of Creator God as the only and ultimate grounds for legitimate human dignity, freedom and rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” our founders assured mankind, and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Not so with Obama. On his repeatedly stated version, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But just what created us (random mutation or perhaps benevolent fairies?) and exactly how did we become endowed with these rights that most cultures and most worldviews and in fact most political systems throughout human history have denied? And further, why did the Judeo-Christian worldview which inspired these founding fathers be dumped on its head, such that its antithesis in the form of the radical homosexual agenda and abortion on demand be enthroned in its place?

Basically, the Judeo-Christian worldview – “Christendom,” if you like – has been treated like a salad bar in the Western Civilization that had been forged by Christianity, and secular humanists can pick out the parts that they like and throw away the rest. But it’s not a salad bar; Judeo-Christianity as both a religion and a worldview is far more like the foundations of a great building. And what these secular humanists have been doing is pulling out the foundational pillars one block at a time until there is nothing left to sustain the surrounding structure.

Which is precisely why the West – which used to be called “Christendom” – is now on the verge of complete collapse on virtually every level.

I see the war on terror, and from the start I have seen the glaring flaw in our strategy (yes, even when George Bush was waging it). Basically, we have confronted totalitarian Islam on the military, political and economic fronts. But we have utterly ignored the religious front – which is precisely the major front by which totalitiarian Islam has been attacking us. Like it or not, 9/11 was a religious act. And there has been no major movement whatsoever – either by the Western powers or by the movements within Islam itself – to confront the religious grounds of the totalitarian Islamists.

And the reason is because we have nothing to confront them with. Secular humanists/atheists have undermined public religious expression at every turn, while cultural relativists have contextualized religion in such a way to strip it of any spiritual power whatsoever. Now when we truly need true spiritual power to confront the demonic power motivating radical Islam, basically all we’ve got is allegorical dirt clods.

In the sphere of Islam, jihadists have the superior Qu’ranic argument that it is THEY who are carrying out Muhammad’s vision for Islam, not the liberal Westernized contextualizers who want to make very clear claims of Muhammad into metaphors and allegories representing something else. Muhammad was a man of genuine violence; he had been in some thirty military campaigns in his life; he had committed numerous genocidal campaigns against “infidels”; and he had another thirty military campaigns planned at the time of his death, including the conquest of Western Europe as the means to spread Islam (“submission”) and the call of Allahu Akbar (a comparative which means “Allah is greater”). If Muhammad is in any way, shape or form a representative paradigm of what it means to be “Muslim,” then the jihadists are right.

And liberalism – whether it be religious/theological or political/cultural liberalism – has exactly what to answer that? Other than mocking or trivializing it?

Did political liberals – like the liberal rabbis from the LA Times article above – truly believe that we overcome the threat of terrorism by simply changing the name to “overseas contingency operation” from “war on terror”?

As bad as the religion of Allah may be for a free society, it has a great deal of force when the competition is cultural nothingness, the decaying leftovers of “salad bar pseudo-Judeo-Christianity.”

2 Timothy 3:5 says of such “Christians”:

“They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!” (New Living Translation)

St. Paul told us, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.” (2 Timothy 3:1). The risen and glorified Jesus told St. John of the seventh and final church age, “But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!” (Revelation 3:16).
of my mouth!

And it is with this final age of de-spiritualized, unglodly lukewarm “Christianity” and “Judaism” that makes God literally puke that staggering Western Civilization rises to the bell.

If anyone wants to know why I come across as angry from time to time in my blogging, it is because when I look around, I keep seeing the series of morally and even rationally terrible and despicable choices we have made right here in America that will invariably end with Antichrist, the Tribulation and Armageddon. And it will not have been God that made this happen, or God who chose this end for mankind; but rather mankind that chose this end for itself.

C.S. Lewis said:

“We can always say we have been the victims of an illusion; if we disbelieve in the supernatural this is what we always shall say. Hence, whether miracles have really ceased or not, they would certainly appear to cease in Western Europe as materialism became the popular creed. For let us make no mistake. If the end of the world appeared in all the literal trappings of the Apocalypse, if the modern materialist saw with his own eyes the heavens rolled up and the great white throne appearing, if he had the sensation of being himself hurled into the Lake of Fire, he would continue forever, in that lake itself, to regard his experience as an illusion and to find the explanation of it in psycho-analysis, or cerebral pathology. Experience by itself proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.” (God in the Dock, “Miracles,” pp. 25-26).

The problem with liberalism is that it “fundamentally transforms” whatever it touches – whether Christianity, Judaism or fiscal and economic reality – into a game of make-believe pretend.

Margaret Thatcher put the end-state of econimic liberalism succinctly: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” And then comes the collapse.

When radical Islamist jihadists attack, you can’t answer or fight with make-believe. Any more than you can fight massive debt with make-believe mass-printed dollars.

My one consolation is this: I’ve cheated; I’ve skipped ahead and read the last pages of Revelation. God – and most definitely not Allah or secular humanism or liberal mainline pseudo religiousity – wins in the end. And when God wins in the end, via the return of Jesus Christ as true King of kings and Lord of lords, He will win in a very literal way indeed.

Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Obama-installed Sonia Sotomayor gazed into the Constitution like gypsies gazing into the murky depths of a crystal ball, and somehow discovered the penumbras and emanations justifying allowing material support to foreign terrorist organizations.

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

”Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,” Roberts said.

Justice Stephen Breyer took the unusual step of reading his dissent aloud in the courtroom. Breyer said he rejects the majority’s conclusion ”that the Constitution permits the government to prosecute the plaintiffs criminally” for providing instruction and advice about the terror groups’ lawful political objectives. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.

The law allows medicine and religious materials to go to groups on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

The Obama administration said the ”material support” law is one of its most important terror-fighting tools. It has been used about 150 times since Sept. 11, resulting in 75 convictions. Most of those cases involved money and other substantial support for terror groups.

One of the funny things is that the “humanitarian aid group” that is behind this case is ITSELF tied to terrorism. But American liberals are determined to serve as the useful idiots for Islamic jihadists.

Better that every single American die a horrible death of radiation poisoning from the next major terror attack than that a single terrorist be deprived of a single “right” as championed by morally idiotic liberal justices on the US Supreme Court.

Even Barack Obama and his insanely leftist administration realizes the sheer craziness of these three morally idiotic whackjob justices. Which begs the question why Obama would have appointed one of said morally idiotic whackkob justices.

Obama is saying he opposes Sonia Sotomayor’s stupid ruling. But the dumbass disgrace supported it and hundreds of idiotic rulings just like it when he appointed this racist and sexist “wise Latina” to the bench in the first place. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot, and then opposing the gunshot wound in your foot.

Leftist ideas cannot possibly work in the real world. Governing by leftist ideology is akin to playing Russian Roulette with all six cylinders loaded.

Obama is about to appoint yet another moral idiot whackjob to the Supreme Court, who will curse this country with her despicable lunacy for decades to come.

You can’t really blame Obama, or his Supreme Court appointees, though. They are merely working to enact the vision of “God damn America!” that Obama’s reverend for 23 years planted in the mind of the Manchurian President.

Here’s why we have such contemptible justices who are trying to destroy America one asinine and self-destructive decision at a time:

“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.”

“The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America . Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.

The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”

Obama campaigned on a platform of complete moral idiocy. At some remote level, he is beginning to realize that his ideology is utterly useless and inherently self-destructive as a basis from which to actually govern. But moral idiocy is all he has to offer. So he’s paralyzed, stuck somewhere between being utterly useless and being inherently self-destructive.

Obama supports the lunatic environmental movement, and then flounders in the Gulf as every solution to contain the damage of the oil leak is opposed by the very environmentalists he appeals to. Obama supports the pro-illegal immigration movement even as he falsely promises to somehow reduce illegal immigration. Obama supports the lunatic liberal judicial approach, and then flounders in the war on terror (renamed the “overseas contingency operation” to satiate the left) as the very liberal judicial approach he so favors gets in the way of actually winning or even just not losing.

The sad thing is that you can count on Obama to keep appointing fools – and then being forced to resist the very rulings that his fools dictate.

History has an unsavory way of repeating itself. And that is especially dangerous when Democrats are running things.

From the Wall Street Journal:

APRIL 7, 2010The Karzai FiascoEchoes of Vietnam in a spat that only helps the Taliban.
President Obama isn’t faring too well at converting enemies to friends, but he does seem to have a talent for turning friends into enemies. The latest spectacle is the all-too-public and counterproductive war of words between the White House and our putative ally, Afghan President Hamid Karzai.The only winner so far in this spat is the Taliban.

The Obama Administration seems to have had it out for Mr. Karzai from the day it took office, amid multiple reports based on obvious U.S. leaks that Vice President Joe Biden or some other official had told the Afghan leader to shape up. The tension escalated after Mr. Karzai’s tainted but ultimately recognized re-election victory last year, and it reached the name-calling stage late last month when President Obama met Mr. Karzai on a trip to Kabul and the White House let the world know that the American had lectured the Afghan about his governing obligations.

The public rebuke was a major loss of face for Mr. Karzai, who later returned fire at the U.S., reportedly even saying at a private meeting that if the Americans kept it up, he might join the Taliban. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs kept up the schoolyard taunts yesterday by suggesting that Mr. Obama might not meet with Mr. Karzai as scheduled in Washington on May 12.

“We certainly would evaluate whatever continued or further remarks President Karzai makes, as to whether it is constructive to have that meeting,” said Mr. Gibbs, in a show of disdain he typically reserves for House Republicans.

The kindest word for all of this is fiasco. American troops are risking their lives to implement a counterinsurgency strategy that requires winning popular support in Afghanistan, and the main message from America’s Commander in Chief to the Afghan people is that their government can’t be trusted. That ought to make it easier to win hearts and minds.

Mr. Karzai has been disappointing as a nation-builder, has tolerated corrupt officials and family members, and can be arrogant and crudely nationalistic. Presumably, however, Mr. Obama was well aware of these defects last year when he recognized the Afghan election results and then committed 20,000 more U.S. troops to the theater.

You go to war with the allies you have, and it’s contrary to any diplomatic principle to believe that continuing public humiliation will make Mr. Karzai more likely to cooperate. On the evidence of the last week, such treatment has only given the Afghan leader more incentive to make a show of his political independence from the Americans.

All the more so given that Mr. Karzai has already heard Mr. Obama promise that U.S. troops will begin leaving Afghanistan as early as July 2011. This shouting spectacle will also embolden the Taliban, who after being run out of Marjah have every reason to tell the citizens of Kandahar that even the Americans don’t like the Afghan government and are short-timers in any case.

This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK’s orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.

By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. public chastisement of Israel’s government, the larger concern over the Karzai episode is what it reveals about Mr. Obama’s diplomatic frame of mind. With adversaries, he is willing to show inordinate patience, to the point of muffling his objections when opposition blood ran in the streets of Tehran. With allies, on the other hand, the President is unforgiving and insists they follow his lead or face his public wrath. The result will be that our foes fear us less, and that we have fewer friends.

I wrote an article yesterday which came out today that recognized this same (quite obvious) point: Obama commits tens of thousands of troops and spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan, and then refuses to call the Afghani government an ally? How is that notinsane?

We won’t lose the war in Afghanistan because of our troops. Our troops are the greatest warriors in the history of the world, and they truly deserve the word “heroes.” If we lose, we will lose because of our failure-in-chief.

Just who or what in the hell are we supposed to be fighting??? Every single attack we have faced – be it on foreign battlefields or right here at home – was the result of a radical Islamic worldview. And we’re supposed to pretend that we’re too morally stupid to realize that???

So, yesterday, we had another “incident” on a passenger jet plane. A man from the Qatari embassy named Mohammed Al-Madadi was on his way to visit a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist minion named Ali Al-Marri imprisoned in Denver when he created an international incident by mocking American security authorities by “joking” that he was attempting to light his shoe bomb.

But we’re responding by increasingly assuming that Islam has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Your grandma is a bigger security risk than Osama bin Laden as far as Obama is concerned.

Obama once said he didn’t like to think in terms of “victory,” in very direct opposition to every president before him (including Ronald Reagan, who summed up his Cold War goals in four words: “We win, they lose.”). I suppose it’s good that Obama doesn’t want victory, because he will never secure one given his America-despising policies.

Obama wanted to relabel terrorism as a “man-caused disaster“; but the only “man-caused disaster” is the Obama administration.

Let’s make sure everyone’s up to speed. On Christmas day a terrorist with a bomb just like the one a terrorist tried to use 8 years ago nearly creates an explosion that would have murdered 290 passengers, plus whoever happened to be in the jumbo jet’s path as it crashed into the airport. The only thing that saved us from mass death and unmitigated disaster was pure dumb luck and the heroism of a passenger – who dragged the terrorist down and separated him from the device he was still attempting to detonate.

Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security trotted out to say “the system worked” – earning immediate derision even from the liberal lamestream media.

She says that she was misinterpreted the first time, and what she meant was that the system worked after the attack, as opposed to before the attack when it utterly failed. Aside from the fact that it really matters that the system work BEFORE the terrorist gets on the plane with the bomb in his underpants, 20,000 pilots angrily pointed out that no, it utterly failed afterward, too:

DALLAS — The pilots union at American Airlines says federal officials failed to notify crews on planes in the United States about the attempted terror attack aboard a Northwest jet on Christmas Day.

Well, the B-team failed. Obama finally decided it was time to bring out the “good, solid B+” team and appear before the cameras himself. Obama came out a full three days after the terrorist attack, presumably armed with accurate information.

After telling Americans that the terrorist was going to be treated like a US citizen rather than like a foreign terrorist and enemy of the state (while simultaneously claiming he would do everything possible to keep us safe), Obama said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was merely an “isolated extremist.” Hardly anything to trifle over. Go home, folks, nothing to see here.

Little Green Footballs immediately called Obama’s idiotic statement the “Outrageous Outrage of the Day.” And every thinking human being on the planet knew that Obama was chock full of the stuff they use to fertilize farmland.

The New York Daily News voters were apparently more prescient in Obama’s grade: 57% gave him an ‘F’, another 19% gave him a ‘D’, and only 13% combined gave him an ‘A’ or the ‘B+’ he gave himself.

So now we’ve finally got Mr B+ by his estimation (and Mr F by most Americans’ view) finally coming out yet again and saying what every non-brain-dead person knew was correct right away when Obama was saying the exact the opposite: that the terrorist was part of a major terrorist organization, very likely al Qaeda:

“We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of al Qaeda, and that this group — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America,” the president said.

Only we already knew all that the day Obama called Abdulmutallab an “isolated extremist,” too. The media had already published links between Abdulmutallab, al Qaeda, and Yemen before Obama even addressed the nation only to deny the obvious.

58% of Americans (that’s 1% more than think Obama deserves an ‘F’ as in “failure” for a grade) think that we should be waterboarding Abdulmutallab until he either tells us what we need to know, or grows gills.

Unfortunately, we voted for a president who would rather protect terrorist’s rights than protect Americans’ lives.

It’s almost as if Obama realizes that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would have been a better terrorist if he’d only had even more help arrive from Gitmo – and wants punks like Abdulmutallab to “be all they can be.”

Obama finally announced today that he was suspending Gitmo transfers to Yemen for at least a little while, whereas only yesterday administration officials were swearing up and down that the transfers would continue. But Obama is allowing “diversity visas” to proceed full speed ahead. Why? Because we don’t have enough radical jihadists coming to us from Yemen. The words “terrorist state” really don’t seem to matter to these people.

I hoped I would find a more or less complete assemblage of all the attempted terror attacks on U.S. soil that we’ve experienced since Obama came to office promising to end terrorism with his sheer exalted wonderfulness.

It wasn’t easy. List like this one are far and few between. I had to go back and stumble across a few names based on some attacks I remembered, and start entering search terms.

The media have clearly dropped the ball in keeping track of Obama’s “success” in dealing with this very real threat.

Barack Obama refused to even use the word “terrorism,” instead calling terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters.” Whereas George Bush took terrorism seriously and went to war to take on those who would kill Americans wherever they were, Barack Obama decided that there was no war, and renamed it an “overseas contingency operation.”

I provided all the html links, and added a couple of comments in brackets.

Despite the hope and change brought along with a new administration, Americans discovered in 2009 that the threat of terrorism remained. There were several near disasters this last year along with a couple of actual man-caused disasters. While creating the following list I was surprised by the large number of arrests on American soil. I assume my surprise is due to the fact that the media generally forgets about these incidents within a very short period of time and does not make any attempt to report them as another piece of a larger puzzle.

– On May 20, 2009 three U.S. citizens (James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams) and one Haitian (Laguerre Payen) from Newburgh, New York were arrested in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx. The men allegedly placed bombs wired to cell phones in three separate cars outside the Riverdale Temple and nearby Riverdale Jewish Center. It was also alleged that they planed to shoot down military planes operating out of Stewart Air National Guard Base. Both the car bombs and the missiles were actually fakes given to the plotters with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [It is also important to note that all three were black converts to Islam radicalized while in the prison system].

– On June 1, 2009 an assailant opened fire on a United States military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an American who had converted to Islam, was accused of killing Private William Long. According to law enforcement officials, Muhammad had conducted research on other targets, including military sites, government facilities and Jewish institutions throughout the country. [Note: a successful terror attack].

– On July 27, 2009seven men were arrested in North Carolina and charged with plotting to wage “violent jihad” outside the United States. Daniel Patrick Boyd, who authorities allege was the ringleader of a group of men that trained in North Carolina, was later also charged with planning to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Boyd and another man, Hysen Sherifi, were charged with conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel.

– On September 14, 2009 Law enforcement agents raided residences in New York City and later that day briefed members of Congress about their terrorism investigation. Authorities found 14 new black backpacks during the raids fueling concern the plan may have been to use them with suicide bombs. Najibullah Zazi and his father Mohammed Zazi were arrested five days later at Najibullah’s home in Denver, Colorado. FBI agents also arrested Ahmad Wais Afzali in New York. Najibullah Zazi, linked by authorities to al Qaeda, was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.

– On September 23, 2009Michael Finton, a 29-year-old convert to Islam who went by the name Talib Islam, was arrested in an alleged plot to blow up a federal building in Illinois. Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building, a courthouse in Illinois. He attempted to detonate it remotely but the explosive was actually harmless, supplied to Islam by the FBI.

– On September 24, 2009Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested after he placed and attempted to detonate what he believed to be a car bomb in the garage of the 60-story Fountain Place office tower in Dallas. The fake explosive was given to him by an undercover FBI agent.

– On October 21, 2009Tarek Mehanna, a Boston area man who lived with his parents and wrote a blog about Islam, was arrested for conspiring to become a jihadist and kill Americans. His alleged plots – all failed – included the assassination of prominent politicians, attacking US troops in Iraq and shooting randomly in a unidentified shopping mall.

– On November 5, 2009 a gunman killed 14 people (including one unborn baby) and wounded 30 others at the Fort Hood military base located near Killeen, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the only suspect in the crime, was radicalized by Muslim ideology. A muslim cleric said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail “whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not” under Islamic law. [There’s your second successful terrorist attack].

– On December 25, 2009 a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate the explosive PETN on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. An apparent malfunction in the device and the quick reaction of passengers saved the airplane and 278 lives on board. After being taken into custody, Abdulmutallab told authorities he had been directed by al-Qaeda.

If the media were looking for a theme, as they always do this time of year, 2009 could be called the “Year of the Home Grown Terrorist” as six of those arrested (James Cromitie, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Daniel Patrick Boyd, Michael Finton, Tarek Mehanna, and Nidal Malik Hasan) were born right here in the United States.

When George Bush took office, there was absolutely no program in place to keep America safe. There were dozens of al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets, and Clinton did nothing nothing. The USS Cole was attacked by al Qaeda in Yemen in October 2000 during the waning days of the Clinton administration, with 17 American sailors killed, and Clinton swept it under the rug to create the illusion of a “clean slate.”

And George Bush, naively “looking forward, not backward,” attitude, failed to do anything to change our lack of protection under that terrible day seven months into his presidency.

Bush woke up fast. And with fury and determination unlike anything this country has seen since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the Bush administration devised a successful system to keep this country safe.

Barack Obama, taking incredibly foolish attitude that terrorism was merely a crime that he could stop with what amounted to a personality cult based on his own wonderfulness, systematically dismantled many of the Bush protections even as he apologized for America’s efforts to keep its citizens safe.

One of the most important things Bush did was to dismantle the wall that the Clinton administration erected preventing the CIA and the FBI from communicating with one another. Liberals want to maintain that the Clinton policy did not change the law, but merely clarified it. But the fact remains that the Clinton administration strengthened the communications barrier when he should have been encouraging intelligence-sharing between our security agencies.

We had a wall separating intelligence agencies into separate and disconnected fiefdoms prior to 9/11.

WASHINGTON — The scapegoat emerging from the Sept. 11 commission inquiry isn’t an elected official or agency but an obscure government policy that came to be known as “the wall.”

On Tuesday, as FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials continued to point the finger of blame at one another, they all seemed to agree that the wall was the overarching villain. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, for one, described it as “the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.”

In other words, Obama decided to surround himself with the men who – out of liberal notions antagonistic to a strong intelligence community – built/strengthened the wall.

Obama selected Leon Panetta, another Clinton political hack, and a man who had absolutely no intelligence experience to qualify for leadership, to run the CIA. And then he selected Janet Napolitano, again an unqualified selection with absolutely no intelligence experience whatsoever, to run Homeland Security.

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.

“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”

After Obama appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, the man who pardoned terrorists for Bill Clinton went right to work attacking the CIA who had helped catch those terrorists in the first place. Democrats and the Obama administration repeatedly demonized the CIA and just as repeatedly threatened to criminalize their efforts to keep us safe.

[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”

Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.

Four former CIA directors loudly objected to Obama’s release of CIA memos. Among other things, the release of those memos – again, for purely partisan political reasons – enabled al Qaeda to know exactly what US interrogators would and would not do and prepare for our new limited and hamstrung techniques.

Now we’re left with, “Tell us what you know, or we’re give you a polite but firmly-worded scolding.”

You might not see this pathetic episode as a microcosm for Obama’s entire failed foreign policy and national security strategy, but you certainly can’t maintain the assertion that what he’s doing is working.

I started out providing a list of terrorists and attempted and successful terrorist attacks.

When Iran gets its nukes and the ballistic missiles to deliver them (and they are very close to both goals), the world will become a different place. They don’t have to launch atomic Armageddon to use their nuclear weapons; all they have to do is block the Strait of Hormuz and drive up oil prices tenfold, or send out a wave of international terror attacks. Will we go to war with them, knowing that if we do they will destroy several of our cities and kill millions of our people?

In other words, we haven’t even BEGUN to see the fruit of Obama’s failures in his “man-caused disasters.”

“The war on terror.” The very phrase demonstrates the unforgivable incompetence of Barrack Hussein. Because his people refused to use the word “terrorism” and tried to replace it with “overseas contingency operation” and “man-caused disaster” to deny the reality of terrorism through politically correct re-labelling. But with terrorist attacks occurring on US soil, what’s the deal with the word “overseas”? It’s right here.

After days of White House officials saying they did a smashing job, even Obama is now finally calling his own administration’s handling of this terror attack “totally unacceptable.”

“There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security,” Obama [FINALLY] said today.

There have been over a dozen attempted terrorist attacks against the United States on American soil in 2009, and two of them have been successful.

“Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don’t seem to like Americans any better because we’re closing down Guantanamo.”

And they don’t like us any better because of Barack Hussein’s naivete, incompetence, and constant apologies denouncing his own country, either.

We have only to look at the last two attacks to see the casual disregard and the blatant incompetence the Obama administration has demonstrated in the war against terrorism.

During the November Fort Hood terrorist attack that killed thirteen soldiers and wounded dozens more, the Obama administration first denied any link to terrorism, then basically suppressed the investigation after scores of details began to emerge revealing what a shocking failure of the system had taken place under Obama’s watch. Obama himself gave an incredibly weird speech just after the attack, in which he offered a “shout out” to a man whom he incorrectly identified as having received the Medal of Honor before spending mere moments acknowledging that more than a dozen US soldiers on a secure American base inside the United States had just been murdered by a jihadist.

In any event, we just had a situation in which a terrorist very nearly detonated a device that probably would have brought the plane down – killing 290 – and possibly would have killed many more as it crashed into Detroit’s airport. The words “Christmas miracle” are being used to describe the luck we had in so narrowly avoiding this disaster.

And what was the Obama response? Well, at first, nothing. The same fawning sycophants that Obama surrounded himself with – who awakened him immediately to notify him that he “won” the Nobel price – didn’t bother to tell him that the United States had just experienced a terrorist attack for three full hours.

Obama didn’t bother to respond (and interrupt his glorious Hawaiian vacation) even after he heard about it. But his minions began running around. Their initial blathering was that “the system has worked very, very smoothly.”

Apparently, Obama believed that the media would give him the same adoring propaganda that they gave him during the campaign (which Bernard Goldberg dubbed “A Slobbering Love Affair“). The narrative was that since the attack didn’t succeed, Barack Obama must be a brilliant commander-in-chief. But fortunately, that lie was almost immediately revealed as a lie and angrily refuted even by the mainstream media.

I mean, even the New York Times is saying Obama screwed this up terribly.

The same incompetent Obama official – Department of Homeland Security administrator Janet Napolitano – who claimed how well the system worked proceeded to acknowledge that the system was a failure the very next day. “The system did not work in this instance,” she said by way of massive understatement.

“White House officials struggled to explain the complicated system of centralized terrorist data and watch lists, stressing that they were put in place years ago by the Bush administration.”

The problem with that thesis is that the Bush system actually worked. Here was a kid (I say “kid” because he looks like he’s about 15 years old) whose name showed up on a terrorist watch list. It’s not George Bush’s fault that the Obama administration ignored the list. Or that they ignored the fact that the UK had refused to issue the kid a visa a few months back after catching the kid in a lie regarding his purpose for visiting the country. Or that the kid had spent the last couple of months in terrorist-dreamland Yemen. Or that the kid’s father had personally gone to the UN embassy and said his son had been radicalized. Or that the kid had no passport to go to the United States. Or that the kid suspiciously didn’t bother to check any luggage on an international flight. Those things were Goerge Bush’s fault exactly HOW?

Like every other time Obama has pointed a demagoguing finger of blame at Bush, there were at least three fingers pointing right at him.

Stop and think about it: Shoe Bomber Richard Reid (aka Abdul Raheem and as Tariq Raja) attempted to blow up a plane with PETN back in December, 2oo1 – only a couple of months after 9/11. Bush systematically implemented policies to keep us safe. Obama tore those policies apart, and look what is happening.

We can blame George Bush for not recognizing that Barrack Hussein was a dangerous man, and sticking him in Gitmo before he had a chance to do more damage. But other than that, no honest person would blame George Bush for Obama’s failure.

When Obama finally bothered to make his initial comment on the attack (in a short statement, taking no questions), he said that the attack had been committed by an “isolated extremist” (and please note the inherent contradiction within even his own statement!). But by the time he said that, it was already obvious that the only thing “isolated” about this attack was the Obama White House. The kid said he had been trained and sent by al Qaeda, and that there were some 25 more terrorists just like him ready to unleash hells of their own. And it turned out that the PETN explosive had come from al Qaeda-base Yemen. And al Qaeda acknowledged that this kid was one of theirs.

Obama also said that his administration was doing “everything in it’s power to keep you safe.” And then he treats the terrorist who had just tried to murder hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans like a common criminal and allows him to lawyer up while doctors attend to the wounds he incurred trying to murder said Americans. For what its worth, the Bush administration would have recognized that this terrorist wasn’t a “criminal” at all, but a perpetrator of an act of war against the United States of America, and an enemy of the state. And the Bush administrator – rather than focusing on the kid’s “rights” – would have instead focused on the country’s right to find out who had sent this punk to murder its citizens and every detail of every aspect of leading up to the attack so that we could stomp out another nest of terrorists.

Now for the idiotic and frankly immoral liberal devices to defend America in a war they won’t even acknowledge is a damn war.

The word “profiling” immediately comes to mind.

Mind you, it’s not that the Obama administration isn’t profiling, just that they are focusing on the wrong profile. I mean, the terrorist in question wasn’t a returning combat veteran who’d recently come back from protecting this country from terrorists; he didn’t have any “tea bags” on him; he wasn’t an evangelical Christian; he wasn’t pro-life. They just had the wrong profile, and need to adjust it to include actual terrorists.

Let us not forget that the terrorists are profiling us.

The Christmas terrorist attack was a naked attempt to murder as many Christians as possible during Christmas. Obama Democrats shriek at the thought that we might profile a terrorist. But the terrorists are sure as hell profiling us.

Then you add the fact that for the last eight years millions and millions of innocent and harmless Americans have been subjected to invasive and embarrassing procedures to make sure we’re not jihadist murderers, but this young Muslim male who attended madrases and came from Yemen and paid for his ticket in cash and didn’t have a passport gets aboard with his damned bomb?

That American grandma in the walker isn’t your terrorist, dumbasses. And it is an affront to common sense and even sanity that you treat that Grandma the same as the 23 year old Muslim whose just come from Yemen.

A lot of liberals are now STILL saying that we don’t dare violate the civil liberties of Muslims, regardless of the fact that 99.9999999999998% of all the hundreds of thousands of terrorist attacks over the past 20 years have been committed by Muslims. They want us to use invasive and expensive scanning equipment that literally strips us naked and shows our boobies, our bottoms, and our hoo hoos, and tramples on everybody’s basic rights, rather than focus on the group that is perpetrating the terror attacks. We need to violate the civil rights of 300 million Americans, rather than acknowledge that Muslim terrorists are all actually Muslims.

George Bush was like Winston Churchill in the war on terror; and Barack Obama is like Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain tried to compromise with terror, negotiate with it. Winston Churchill, nearly alone among leaders (FDR included), realized that Nazism was so evil that it literally had to be fought to the death.

Obama Democrats believed George Bush viewed terrorism through an ideological prism, and saw nonexistent enemies everywhere. The thing is that Obama Democrats ALSO view terrorism through an ideological prism, but see enemies NOWHERE. And Obama’s ideology keeps biting him in the balls because both his ideology and his policies simply fail to correspond to reality.

Asked about the problems Obama is facing in Afghanistan, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went to his tried and anything-but-true playbook of demagoguery, saying:

“You can’t under-resource the most important part of our War on Terror – you can’t under-resource that for five, or six, or seven years…..and hope to snap your fingers and have that turn around in a few months.”

It’s all Bush’s fault. That’s pretty much all you have to know about the Obama administration’s political strategy, in a nutshell.

Gibb’s by now completely expected demagoguery doesn’t account for why Barack Obama has already lost more troops in Afghanistan so far this year than George Bush ever lost, as the following chart shows:

I would submit another couple of theories instead, such as:

1) The White House can’t possibly win the “war on terror” that Gibbs refers to when in point of fact they deny that such a war even exists in the first place. If you pick up a copy of “The Complete Moron’s Guide To Winning A War,” you find out that the first step is to acknowledge that you are actually in a war. Too bad, Obama didn’t read the book.

I don’t know, but maybe we would be better off with a president who called a war on terror something like, oh I don’t know, a “war on terror.” Instead we have a president who was apparently appalled by such a barbaric term as ‘war’ or such a pejorative term as ‘terror’ and preferred the description, ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ instead.

Conservatives predicted that Europe would talk a good talk but refuse to fight a good fight. Too bad we elected a president who lacked the wisdom and common sense to understand European cowardice and apathy. Because we elected a fool, we will struggle mightily to live up to our fools’ grandiose promises.

4) Maybe part of the problem in Afghanistan is that you’re own troops don’t trust your commitment.

Barack Obama’s efforts to undermine President Bush’s war in Iraq are so lengthy that I can only direct you to the list of the times that he tried to screw our soldiers and cause them to lose in Iraq. But it’s hard to read it and not come to the conclusion that Barack Obama has an awful lot of explaining to do about why he so unrelentingly worked against victory. Tragically, the media – which shared Obama’s liberalism – failed to hold him accountable. And now what is Obama to do when Obama’s liberal base does the same thing to Afghanistan that Obama himself did in Iraq?

And here we are, with the Pentagon doubting Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan. Such a SHOCKER!Who would have ever figured?:

WASHINGTON — The prospect that U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal may ask for as many as 45,000 additional American troops in Afghanistan is fueling growing tension within President Barack Obama’s administration over the U.S. commitment to the war there.

On Monday, McChrystal sent his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan to the Pentagon , the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO . Although the assessment didn’t include any request for more troops, senior military officials said they expect McChrystal later in September to seek between 21,000 and 45,000 more troops. There currently are 62,000 American troops in Afghanistan .

However, administration officials said that amid rising violence and casualties, polls that show a majority of Americans now think the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting. With tough battles ahead on health care, the budget and other issues, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials are increasingly anxious about how the American public would respond to sending additional troops.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media, said Biden has argued that without sustained support from the American people, the U.S. can’t make the long-term commitment that would be needed to stabilize Afghanistan and dismantle al Qaida. Biden’s office declined to comment.
“I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier,” a senior Pentagon official said. “We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war.”

Conservatives have been claiming for YEARS AND YEARS that Democrats lacked the courage or will to sustain a war through difficult times. That’s because again and again, with a perfect track record over the past 40 years, Democrats have been the ones undermining America’s military efforts on foreign soil. And why on earth should anyone doubt for a second that they’re going to break their streak now?

So beat me with an electric cattle prod, but I simply couldn’t be more shocked that we’re already proving to be right — AGAIN!!!

What we’re ultimately going to see in Afghanistan from Democrats is the same fair-weather friends that Bush saw in Iraq. We wont go back to “The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan” only because a Democrat is now in the White House. But the same spirit of cowardice, abandonment, and betrayal that drove the Democrats’ partisan agenda under Bush will resurface. It’s just who these people are.

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that December, she declared, “I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote” and was one that “I stand by.”

Of course her “stand” didn’t last one second longer than her partisan political self-interests.

Hillary Clinton is joined by Nany Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Kerry, and a whole host of Democrats who supported taking military action in Iraq before they were against it.

Nearly 60% of Democrat Senators actually voted for the Iraq War. The 2003 Iraq War actually had better Congressional support than the 1990 Gulf War. Democrats went from embracing every essential claim that President Bush made to justify the war – including supporting the war itself – only to deceitfully degenerate into “Bush lied, people died.” But it wasn’t Bush who lied – it was Democrats.

Charles Krauthammer cites Democrat strategist and Kerry ’04 campaigner Bob Shrum’s describing Afghanistan as the “right war” as a tactic to attack Bush in Iraq while not being “anti-war.” It was an incredibly cynical strategy from an incredibly cynical political party. Frankly, anyone who thinks that the Democrat Party will do the right thing for the right reasons in Afghanistan is simply deluded.

No nation can get involved in a war because of public opinion, and then abandon that same war because of public opinion. Such a policy would make any kind of sustained foreign policy completely unsustainable, and would make us utterly unworthy of any alliances whatsoever. And that is precisely what makes what Democrats – and Barack Obama himself – so morally despicable for what they did in Iraq. They were for the war when it served their interests to be for the war, and then they turned against the war the moment the opinion polls began to show fading support in order to politically demonize Republicans who continued to stay the course. When the Senate Majority Leader of the United States of America – Democrat Harry Reid – literally declared defeat in Iraq even as our soldiers were in Iraq fighting to secure victory, it was a literal act of treason.

Frankly, given how Democrats demagogued changing American opinions about the war in Iraq, it is talionic justice that they now suffer due to the change in popular opinion over Afghanistan. The true shame now, JUST AS IT WAS IN IRAQ, is that our warriors should not be exposed to the whims of the public.

5) Look back at the table above. Barack Obama has already sustained 17.5% more American causalities in Afghanistan than George Bush did in 2008 – with a full third of the year remaining. At this point, Obama is poised to sustain more U.S. casualties in Afghanistan than George Bush did in the first five years of the war combined.

There is clearly a resurgence in the ranks of our terrorist (yes, I actually said ‘terrorist’) enemy.

They understand – even as our Pentagon fears – that America under Obama is losing its will to fight, and that America now has the kind of leadership that has already demonstrated a willingness to cut and run on a fight. All they need to do is read Barack Obama’s own surrender-rhetoric regarding Iraq to understand their current enemy. And that understanding is understandably energizing them to fight even harder.

6) I might also add that our current White House is literally “at war” with the CIA that contributes to the operational intelligence our military planners use. The CIA is suffering from bad morale which is at at a thirty year low. While I do not have the background to assess whether the Obama White House’s undermining of the CIA is responsible for fewer intelligence breakthroughs in Afghanistan and subsequently fewer successful military operations, I believe I have a prima facia reason to believe that such is the case.

President Obama, how it George Bush’s fault that you decided to target the CIA as part of your political witch hunt?

At the present rate, Barack Obama is going to sustain more than 76% more American casualties in Afghanistan than did George Bush last year. And he’s blaming what is clearly his failure on Bush?

The fact that Barack Obama has based so much of his “leadership” on demonizing and demagoguing his predecessor is actually evidence of the fact that he himself is no real leader at all.

And that failure in leadership may be the most significant reason of all for Obama’s failure in Afghanistan. As he waffles around indecisively, his troops – who don’t trust him and can’t count on him – are going to increasingly find themselves drifting helplessly along with the next approval poll.

It’s no longer a “war on terror,” and we are no longer dealing with “terrorism” or “terrorists.” Oh, no. Obama will give a 6,000 word speech in Egypt on American-Islamic issues and NEVER use any of those hateful terms.

Nope. We’re now a nation that is managing an “overseas contingency operation,” rather than fighting a war on terror. We’re trying to reduce “man-caused disasters” rather than terrorism (at least while my lawsuit against DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for sexually discriminating by calling it “man-caused” rather than “human-caused” is still pending). And, whatever you want to call the people who are launching murderous attacks against innocent and unarmed civilians, don’t you DARE call them “terrorists.”

Well, whatever we choose to call them (I like “meanies,” because it avoids all those hateful politically incorrect words, but still says they’re mean), Obama has stopped waterboarding them and started mirandizing them.

I feel so cozy and safe under Barack Obama. If we ever suffer a massive overseas contingency man-caused disaster, we can know that he will give a really cautiously-worded speech in retaliation. And who would want something like THAT directed against them?

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Timesarticle.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the “global justice” initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Thanks in part to the popularity of law and order television shows and movies, many Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning – so named because of the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona that required police officers and other law enforcement officials to advise suspected criminals of their rights.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

A lawyer who has worked on detainee issues for the U.S. government offers this rationale for the Obama administration’s approach. “If the US is mirandizing certain suspects in Afghanistan, they’re likely doing it to ensure that the treatment of the suspect and the collection of information is done in a manner that will ensure the suspect can be prosecuted in a US court at some point in the future.”

But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation–lawyering up.”

According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”

Rogers adds: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

One thing is clear, though. A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had a lawyer, Tenet wrote, “I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.”

I liked hearing “You have the right to remain silent” from Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet; I HATE hearing it from Obama to a terrorist who knows the murderous plans of his terrorist buddies (Sorry: I meant to say “meanie”).

Stephen Hayes cites George Tenet because he was a CIA Director who had been appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton. A corroborating source is fellow career intelligence professional and former CIA Director General Michael Hayden, who said, “fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations [of terrorists Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al Shibh].”

What do you truly think we would have learned from these hard-core terrorist murderers if we’d given them lawyers instead of an invitation to experience some pain? I mean, seriously, if you think that being nice to these guys in the presence of their lawyers would have yielded intelligence information, then I can paint string yellow and sell it to you as 24k gold chains.

This is amazing folly on an unimaginable scale.

“The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

President Barack Obama has said keeping Ghailani from coming to the United States “would prevent his trial and conviction.” Taking a drastically different stance, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio labeled Tuesday’s move “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”

But no. We’re going to let them in under Obama. We’re going to let them make a mockery of our court system. We’re going to let them in to radicalize more and more of our inmates into the ways of terrorist jihad.

Obama’s new foreign policy is a disgrace. Giving foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield miranda protections and providing them with lawyers is an insult to our warriors who hunt these killers down.

Bush kept us safe. For that he has been unrelentingly demonized by the left. Those days – other than the ongoing demonization – are gone. Now we have the Obama administration – which rebranded “the war on terror” as an “overseas contingency operation”; which decided to start referring to “terror attacks” as “man-caused disasters”; which only just today screwed up and leaked nuclear secrets – in charge of keeping America safe.

Why worry about terrorists coming to us from Muslim lands when we can grow our very own hardened Islamist terrorists right here?

Yesterday we suffered the first successful domestic terrorist attack (the second if you count the Tiller murder) under the Obama administration. The Muslim convert who killed one American soldier and wounded another outside a recruiting center offered this account for his actions:

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 23, also known as Carlos Bledsoe, is charged with capital murder and 16 counts of terroristic acts.

According to the police reports, Muhammad admitted to shooting the victims, and then revealed how and why.

He told police that he put three weapons, including an assault rifle, into his SUV and then drove around until he saw the Recruiting Station and the two soldiers smoking outside the building.

He then pulled into the parking lot in front of the station, stopped his vehicle, and began shooting at the soldiers standing outside, firing several rounds from an SKS assault rifle with the intent of killing them. Muhammad also told officers that he would have killed more soldiers if they had been on the parking lot. Muhammad also told police he was a practicing Muslim, and that he was mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past.

The terrorist who contributed to one of Obama’s “man-caused disasters” had maps to several other targets.

But these are just warm-up acts for the bloodletting to follow. We only need to worry over such attacks when we let a radicalized convict out of one of our prisons.

Yesterday on Fox News Special Report, Amy Kellog in London reported:

“The general manager of al-Arabia says the press tends to treat Obama as a friend of the region, something that could backfire efforts to combat extremism.”

The general manager of al-Arabia then said:

“I have to mention as well – uh, let’s call them, you know, the ‘bad guys’ – that time they feared Bush. They do not seem to fear Obama right now. So the psychology of fear does not exist today with Obama so far because they don’t think he will launch a war. They don’t take his threats seriously.”

“They feared Bush. They do not seem to fear Obama. They don’t think he will launch a war. They don’t take his threats seriously.”

And what happens when Islamist terrorists lose their fear of America and its president?

We have a major al-Qaeda announcement from Osama bin Laden warning America of “revenge on the U.S.”

And we have a terrifying message coming from a major al-Qaeda recruiter, Kuwati professor Abdallah Fahd Abd Al-’Aziz Al-Nafisi. During his message, he predicted a biological warfare attack “guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour,” and prayed for success of potential attacks “bombing nuclear plants within the US.”

Abdallah Al-Nafisi: Four pounds of anthrax – in a suitcase this big – carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the US, are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour, if it is properly spread in population centers there. What a horrifying idea. 9/11 will be small change in comparison. Am I right? There is no need for airplanes, conspiracies, timings, and so on. One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this “confetti” all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real “celebration.”

The WMD is a problem. The Americans are afraid that the WMDs might fall into the hands of “terrorist” organizations, like Al-Qaeda and others. There is good reason for the Americans’ fears, because Al-Qaeda used to have in the Herat region… It had laboratories in north Afghanistan. They have scientists, chemists, and nuclear physicists. They are nothing like they are portrayed by these mercenary journalists – backward Bedouins living in caves. No, no. By no means. This kind of talk can fool only naïve people. People who follow such things know that Al-Qaeda has laboratories, just like Hizbullah. Hizbullah has laboratories in South Lebanon, in which it produces weapons and sells them. Hizbullah has laboratories in South Lebanon, from which it sells weapons to Romania and Hungary.

While Obama drones on about a peace plan that he is indicating to the Muslim world will benefit Palestinians at the expense of Jews, al-Nafisi says:

Allah states in the Koran that the hostility between us and [the Jews] is eternal. So whoever talks about dialogue – cut off his tongue! What dialogue are they talking about?! There is no room for dialogue. Allah said that our hostility towards the Jews is eternal, and then along comes someone and talks about brotherhood and so on… This contradicts the Koran. Anyone who contradicts the Koran is an infidel. Accusing people of heresy? Yes, I’m all for it. Yes, I support accusing people of heresy.

And he ends his message by saying:

I, Abdallah Fahd Abd Al-’Aziz Al-Nafisi, am inciting you to confront, using any means possible, anyone who speaks out against the resistance. “Any means possible” – get it?

Al-Qaeda knows that the United States is wearing a giant “Kick Me” sign on its southern border. Given the fact that Mexican peasants can easily cross into the country, how hard could it be for hardened Spanish-speaking Islamist terrorists to find their own path in with four extra pounds of weight?

Neville Chamberlain – the former prime minister of Great Britain who has come to be universally mocked for his appeasement of Adolf Hitler – was absolutely ruthless in advancing his liberal-socialist domestic agenda. It was only in his foreign policy and his dealings with dictators that he revealed himself to be pathetically weak and appallingly naive.

The message that Obama promised America was that he would somehow put an end to all the enmity and divisions of the world. But he hasn’t reduced our Islamist enemies by so much as a single terrorist. Rather, all he has succeeded in doing is removing their fear of any meaningful American response under a president they rightly believe to be weak.

The state of Montana has drawn a line in the sand by passing a new gun law that virtually thumbs its nose at the federal government’s encroachment on state and individual rights. If the tea parties were the first shot across the bow of liberal fascism, this is surely the second – and it’s being done with heavy artillery.

Liberals have been employing “sanctuary cities” across the nation that flouted federal immigration laws. Now conservatives are taking that same idea to have “sanctuary states” to protect their citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights against liberal tyranny. And Montana, Utah, and Texas are leading the nation in standing up to the federal government’s unconstitutional laws in direct violation of states’ rights.

Montana Governor Brian D. Schweitzer, for what it’s worth, is a Democrat.

HELENA, Mont. – Montana is trying to trigger a battle over gun control — and perhaps make a larger point about what many folks in this ruggedly independent state regard as a meddlesome federal government.

In a bill passed by the Legislature earlier this month, the state is asserting that guns manufactured in Montana and sold in Montana to people who intend to keep their weapons in Montana are exempt from federal gun registration, background check and dealer-licensing rules because no state lines are crossed.

That notion is all but certain to be tested in court.

The immediate effect of the law could be limited, since Montana is home to just a few specialty gun makers, known for high-end hunting rifles and replicas of Old West weapons, and because their out-of-state sales would automatically trigger federal control.

“It’s a gun bill, but it’s another way of demonstrating the sovereignty of the state of Montana,” said Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who signed the bill.

Carrie DiPirro, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, had no comment on the legislation. But the federal government has generally argued that it has authority under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to regulate guns because they can so easily be transported across state lines.

Guns and states’ rights both play well in Montana, the birthplace of the right-wing Freemen militia and a participant in the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and ’80s, during which Western states clashed with Washington over grazing and mineral extraction on federal land.

Montana’s leading gun rights organization, more hardcore than the National Rifle Association, boasts it has moved 50 bills through the Legislature over the past 25 years. And lawmakers in the Big Sky State have rebelled against federal control of everything from wetland protection to the national Real ID system.

‘Made in Montana’
Under the new law, guns intended only for Montana would be stamped “Made in Montana.” The drafters of the law hope to set off a legal battle with a simple Montana-made youth-model single-shot, bolt-action .22 rifle. They plan to find a “squeaky clean” Montanan who wants to send a note to the ATF threatening to build and sell about 20 such rifles without federal dealership licensing.

If the ATF tells them it’s illegal, they will sue and take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if they can.

Similar measures have also been introduced in Texas and Alaska.

“I think states have got to stand up or else most of their rights are going to be buffaloed by the administration and by Congress,” said Texas state Rep. Leo Berman.

AN ACT EXEMPTING FROM FEDERAL REGULATION UNDER THE COMMERCE CLAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES A FIREARM, A FIREARM ACCESSORY, OR AMMUNITION MANUFACTURED AND RETAINED IN MONTANA; AND PROVIDING AN APPLICABILITY DATE. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MONTANA:

This is defiance as a thing of art:

It is a determination to keep fighting for one’s freedom no matter how hopeless things might look:

And why is this level of defiance necessary? An image worth a thousand curses suffices by way of explanation:

We’ve got a president who is firing CEOs, stacking boards of directors, changing the rules for the auto manufacturers’ bankruptcy filings in order to favor the unions that supported him over the secured creditors. And if they don’t like it, they are met with frightening threats from the administration and death threats from union members. If that isn’t bad enough, we’ve also got card check on the horizon, which would allow union thugs to intimidate workers into unionizing with the union allowed to know exactly how each worker voted.

We’ve got a president who won’t let banks repay bailout loans (which in many cases were literally forced on them in the first place) so he can continue to impose onerous terms and conditions on them and control what they do and how they do it.

We’ve got a president who is planning to nationalize health care – and the one-sixth of our economy that it represents – even as he moves to impose costly and burdensome cap-and-trade regulations that would (in Obama’s own words) necessarily cause energy prices to soar.

And we’ve got a president who is attempting to nationalize student loans such that private lenders are phased out altogether. If Obama gets his way, the government will loan directly to families and students, making them directly indebted to the federal government. The government will necessarily get to decide which students, which schools, and which academic programs get loans. An option for students is to repay their loans by means of “national service,” which already precludes any type of religious service whatsoever. The potential of liberal big government harnessing student labor to staff liberal organizations such as ACORN is becoming all-too real.

We have a new administration that moved to criminalize political differences by targeting Bush officials as war criminals, even as returning veterans and pro-life Americans are labeled as “rightwing extremists” in a DHS report sent out to the nation’s law enforcement agencies and police departments.

I’ve been saying something over and over in different ways. What the liberals are doing now will ultimately result in a “rightwing” backlash. What is true in physics is true in politics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Liberals are pushing and pushing and pushing through one new massive spending program and one new policy after another that will change and undermine this country forever afterward.

Under Obama, terrorism is now called an “overseas contingency operation” and terror attacks are now nothing more than “man-caused disasters.” In attacking the CIA as a means to attack Bush, Obama has created a depressed, sullen, and angry morale which promises to transfer into “cover your ass” caution and bureaucratic gamesmanship. He has undermined our security to a shocking degree. If we are attacked, this country will swing so far to the right so fast it will be absolutely unreal.

But even if we are not attacked, our country will likely implode under its own weight: trillions of dollars of reckless spending will have that effect as our dollar devalues and our interest payments on the debt begin to soar when inflation begins to take its toll. Ultimately our taxes will skyrocket due to all of this spending. CBS News has an article from March entitled, “If China Stops Lending Us Money, Look Out.” Well, guess what? They’re doing exactly that. They’re canceling our credit card.

In a poll of chief executive officers taken prior to the election, 74 percent of the executives said they feared “that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.” And some of the CEOs predicted that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” And with the Congress in nearly total Democratic control, they ARE being implemented.

When Obama and the Democrats bankrupt the country and undermine our entire social structure with massive spending programs and massive bureaucracies that cannot be undone, which direction will the country turn? And how complete will that turnaround be?

Liberals are ignoring one ominous warning of popular outrage after another, claiming that conservatism and the Republican Party are dead. And they will likely ignore what is going on in Montana – which is led by a Democrat governor – as well. They are doing so to both their party’s and their country’s peril.

Montana, you’ve done a great thing for liberty, which is freedom from the growing tyranny of the smiley-face-fascist nanny state.

The backlash against big government liberal tyranny is beginning. And it will become larger and hotter as Obama’s policies take their toll. Let us hope that the spark turns into a fire before – rather than after – Obama has done too much damage to recover from.